nvkhkhr
Prime VIP
Adobe’s Photoshop and Premiere Pro are industry-standard professional software tools relied upon by creative types around the world. These tools, and the rest of the Creative Suite, are incredibly powerful, but they are overkill for most users. They are also rather expensive–if you are a pro it’s just a small cost of doing business, but for the home user or hobbyist they can be prohibitive priced. That’s why Adobe has their Elements products. These are easy to use, affordable alternatives to the CS-level software.
Today Adobe released Photoshop Elements 9 and Premiere Elements 9 for Windows and OS X. Available as a $149 bundle, or $99 individually, the software titles bring most of the power of their pro-level variants, but are easier to understand and aimed at casual-to-enthusiast users. In other words, this isn’t the baby version of Premiere, but you won’t need to take a college course in video editing to be able to use it.
What’s new? Check out Adobe’s feature list for PSE9 and the comparison page for the new versions.
Adobe isn’t as clear about the differences between the CS5 versions and the Elements ones, but after demoing each I have noticed that it’s not all about what’s missing–Elements adds in ways to make the programs easier to understand. You can do a lot of the same things, but Elements will usually try to automate processes for you and change terminology to phrases approaching plain English. That means avoiding terms like “refine edges” and “unsharp mask”.
Some of the biggest news with this release is that this if the first time that Premiere Elements will be on the Mac. It’ll go up against iMovie ‘09, where it has a major advantage in terms of power and versatility. Another focus was an updated Elements Organizer, which is sort of like a simplified version of Lightroom, with the organizing tools but without the complication of nondestructive editing. Finally there are lots of sharing tools, so your images are videos can quickly be put on Facebook, Flickr, and others.
